Well, it’s Trinity Sunday, which means that Easter Season is over. I have to remind myself not to begin the service with, “Alleluia, Christ is risen.” It’s time to return to the opening acclamation we use most of the year: “Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Although I really like the Easter acclamation, I suppose it’s fitting that we return to our usual one, and it’s especially fitting that we do it on Trinity Sunday: Before we’re ten seconds into the service, we’ve affirmed our belief in the Trinity: “Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

We have this one Sunday a year when we celebrate and honor a theological doctrine. And, across the land, you can almost hear thousands, hundreds of thousands, of good Christians groaning: “Oh, no. Not only a sermon about a theological doctrine, but about one as hard and irrelevant as the Trinity.”

I know. Sometimes I groan too. But stick with me for a while. Talking about the Trinity is hard, there’s no question about that. I’m reminded that a twelfth-century monk named Brother Elric botched a sermon on the Trinity and took a vow of silence for the rest of his life. (By the way, there’s no chance that I will ever take a vow of silence, no matter how this goes, so forget it.)

Talking about the Trinity is hard, but it is not irrelevant. I have a friend who told me that her neck hurt. She saw a chiropractor, who said, “I need to adjust your hips.” “But it’s my neck that hurts,” she said. “Your hips are your foundation,” he said. “When they’re out of whack, your neck hurts.” The Trinity is the foundation for our understanding of God. If it’s out of whack, we’re likely to show up with a pain somewhere else in our theology.

So, to begin our understanding of the Trinity, lets recall Jesus telling Nicodemus (and us) that an experience of God is like being completely remade, being born again, born from above. Let’s recall him saying that people who have been so transformed, so filled with the Spirit of God, are free like the wind. Let’s recall Jesus telling Nicodemus that the God we encounter is so loving that God invites the whole world into eternal relationship with God at the cost of God’s only Son.

That might seem strange, to start a discussion about a theological doctrine with Jesus telling us all these powerful things But, really, it’s not. Because these passages are the result of the early Church’s reflections on their experience of God through Christ. “These thing he said,” the early Church is telling us through the centuries, “these things —about being remade, reborn; about being free as the wind; about God being so committed as to give his Son — these things ring true with us. They resonate with our experience of God through Christ.”

The point is that whenever we talk about theology, we need to be reminded that it is not some “pointy-headed,” purely academic, irrelevant exercise. Our experience of God is what we hold most precious. Our experience of God precedes theology or doctrine. Our experience of God is what theology and doctrine attempt to describe. And so it is our experience of God that leads us to the doctrine of the Trinity.

At first blush, the Trinity doesn’t seem much like an effort to describe our experience of a loving, freeing, transforming, self-sacrificing God. It seems instead like an impenetrable block of fourth century, self-contradictory, Greek philosophy. We say God is One in Three—“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.” The Athanasian Creed, which is in the historical documents section of your Prayer Book, says that “there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one. . . .” In the Nicene Creed, we start by saying that we believe in one God, and then we talk about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The discussion of the Father and Spirit are relatively straightforward, but when we talk about the Son, we say Jesus Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.” Whew!

The history behind all this is pretty complex. It is full of rival factions, misunderstandings, complex Greek philosophy and hot tempers. Finally the Church held its first great council at Nicea in 325. After much debate, it came down to the Greek letter iota, which changed a word so that we affirm that Christ is of “one substance” with the Father instead of “a similar substance.” And so the phrase, “It doesn’t matter one iota” was born.

Well, does the doctrine of the Trinity, almost seventeen centuries later, matter one iota to us? Certainly not if it is just something we are told to believe and dutifully recite. But if we look for the Church's experience of God that gave birth to the doctrine, we might find that we have something in common with our fourth century brothers and sisters.

The Trinity arose as the Church struggled to understand what kind of God could have walked among us as Christ. If you’ve ever tried to answer a child’s questions, you know that’s not an easy one. “Daddy, how is Jesus God’s Son and God at the same time?” “Time for bed, Sweetheart.”

The Trinity arose out of the Church saying “no” to two competing attempts to answer the child’s question of how God could walk among us as a human being. One said that Jesus wasn’t really God; he was a lesser god, a demigod — sort of an “in-betweener.” Another view said, “No, no. He was God. But he was God playing the role of a human, like an actor playing a part; God putting on a human costume.” Of course, you really can’t tell much about who the actor is as a person by seeing him play a part.

What defeated both these schools of thought was not sophisticated Hellenistic philosophy or complex logical arguments. What defeated them was the community’s experience of God through Christ in prayer, in community, by sharing one another’s sufferings, and at the Lord’s Table.

Those folks knew that they had not experienced Christ as some sort of “in-betweener.” Through Christ, they experienced God, the real McCoy. And those folks also knew that in Christ, they did not just experience God playing a part so that you have to wonder what God is really like in the dressing room. They knew they had experienced all of God’s authentic self.

So those Christians affirmed that through Christ we get the real God, and we get all of the real God. In affirming that, they came up with all the confusing language in the Creed that doesn’t help much if you’re trying to answer a child’s bedtime question. As a philosophical statement, I don’t really care very much about that language. It was born of a philosophical system that has been obsolete for at least 500 years. But I care very much that it is a hymn of praise handed down to us by our Tradition from our fourth century sisters and brothers.

And I care very much that in the language of their time, they were saying that their experience of God showed them that God could be God and Jesus at the same time because relationship is at the very core of God’s being. What kind of God could have walked among us? A God who is all about relationship. What kind of God could have walked among us? A God whose internal life, whose essence, is so perfectly and completely about relationship, that God’s inner life, God’s being, is made of relationships, relationships so perfect that there is perfect unity among them. That’s a mouthful, so let me say that again: A God whose internal life, whose essence, is so perfectly and completely about relationship, that God’s inner life, God’s being, is made of relationships, relationships so perfect that there is perfect unity among them.

And why do we care? Because from perfect relationships leading to perfect unity, God can love us perfectly. And that is our experience of God. God loves us perfectly. Authentically. All of God. The real God. What it means is that we who are created in the image of our Trinity God are fundamentally created to be in loving relationship. To love God with all of our being. To love one another as Christ loves us. To love authentically. Not to play roles, but instead to give all of ourselves. Never to act out of selfishness or for our needs only, but to live for the community, because our God lives for the community, and died for the community. And so we are created by our Trinitarian God to be in perfect relationship and perfect unity as God is in perfect relationship and perfect unity.

But, of course, who are we kidding? We are also fallen beings. There is something wrong with us, and we just can’t or don’t do it. None of us have even one entirely healthy, loving relationship. Not any one of us. Not one relationship. Not entirely. And none of mine are even close.

But the Trinity teaches us that God is perfect at loving relationships. It is literally who God is. God is so good in fact, that God has said that if we will just be in the relationship, constant failings and all, God will do the rest. God loves so perfectly that God will treat us as if we can love perfectly too. And God loves so much that God will suffer for it.

So, thank you for sticking with me though a discussion of a theological doctrine. It is hard, but as you sit there, wanting to love, wanting to be loved, I hope you never think it is irrelevant. In fact, when you reflect on the Trinity, I hope you will think with profound gratitude, “Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”